I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still here.
As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.
As founder and an editor at ML, I've been trying to figure out how to make my interest in local news sustainable. If Mission Local is a model, the answer might be that you - the readers - reward steady and smart content. As a thank you for that support we work every day to make our content even better.
More by Lydia Chávez
Is this a picture of what I think it is? Unless I am severely mistaken, it is the tuft in front of our former house on Ramona Ave? It certainly looks like it, and the front room and bed room windows still look exactly the same as when we lived there. We were young back then, and struggling to find a landlord who would rent to an interracial gay couple (yes: in San Francisco. And, no: it was not that long ago, and it is not unusual for folx to face similar issues today). Carol Ruth Silver was our landlord. She was not great at upkeep, and we had our differences. But she rented to us, and we knew she had been a progressive member of our SF Board of Supervisors (search her on the web! She was at City Hall when Milk & Moscone were assassinated, and she was next on Dan White’s list of people he planned to murder). I am ashamed to say we didn’t realize at the time that she had also been a freedom rider during the Civil Rights struggles. Steve (then my lover, now my husband of almost 30 years) fell sick with AIDS while we lived here, and he returned here after having been in a coma for 3 months at SF General Hospital. This is where he made a slow and miraculous full recovery. (If you wanna know more, you can watch the documentary “5B” on Amazon and other streaming platforms). We were able to buy a house in another part of the Mission (closer to SFGH) in 2000, and we have lived there very happily ever since. But 68 Ramona Ave will always hold an essential place in the space and time of our life stories. Thank you for this great picture of the Ramona Tuft!